We Went Into Debt for a Farm Table

The farm table of my dreams is 96 inches long and 44 inches wide. Pine, probably, with sturdy, gently tapered legs, admirably devoid of decorative flourishes. It’s warm and domestic yet powerful, steadfast. Timeless, but also alive. As elemental and pure as a crackly old country ballad, hewn from solid wood.

Naturally, it’s built of reclaimed lumber—rafters salvaged from the planks of a sunken Spanish schooner, or an old church down South, the echoes of a thousand Sunday sermons trapped deep in its wood grain.

Technically, I guess you could describe it as artisanal, but you wouldn’t have to. It’s obvious. Think of a farm table fashioned by hand and passed down for generations. A table on which babies have been birthed, holiday turkeys carved, games of rummy won and lost, tax bills fretted over, fists slammed down in marital frustration.

I’ve given it a lot of thought.

The farm table fantasy is one that my wife, Amy, and I shared, in contrast to some of our other home decor obsessions. Like that time she devised a scheme to build our own Chinese wedding bed (sort of a cross between a canopy bed and an opium den) out of discarded pane windows. To me, sleeping in what would essentially be a greenhouse, however charmingly ramshackle, sounded claustrophobic if not occasionally sweltering. Meanwhile, my yearning for an antique Parisian club chair, in which I would, you know, read all the great Russian novels while sipping single-malt and listening to old Miles Davis LPs, left her rolling her eyes.

The farm table transcended all that, probably because it was, at heart, utterly plain: a blank canvas, if appealingly coarsened and pockmarked, on which just about anyone could readily paint his or her own distinctive nesting fetishes. My own were mostly tied to writerly ambitions: I pictured chapter revisions of a work in progress neatly piled at one end, a full pot of coffee at the other, an electric typewriter humming in the center. She envisioned a precocious toddler leaning over the generous surface, diagramming complex math problems with macaroni and glue on a big piece of foam core. Both of us imagined our friends gathered around a hearty Provençal bouillabaisse and a lightly dressed arugula-and-Parmesan salad, glasses of Nebbiolo all around.

The farm table could handle anything.

Ah, but where to put it? In our compact Brooklyn apartment, we didn’t actually have a dining room, much one that could accommodate an aircraft carrier.

Unless!

Like so many crazy schemes, the idea of renovating our entire apartment to fit the farm table began as sort of a joke. “Why do we need all these walls, anyway?” I asked idly one evening. Amy looked around, considering. “Actually, they’re probably not load-bearing, right?” she finally said.

A few months later, having borrowed a terrifyingly large pile of money from our bank by essentially resetting the clock on our mortgage, we set a contractor loose with his reciprocating saw. In the end, two walls would disappear entirely. Our tiny kitchen, still sporting canary-yellow formica cabinetry installed during the Nixon era, would be torn apart and opened up in the contemporary style. We kept the bedroom and bathroom, but otherwise there’d be no “rooms” to speak of. Just areas. Zones. And right in the middle of it all, a great expanse in which to place the central feature, the soul of what would be our brand-new lives.

“I can’t wait to get rid of this,” Amy said of the white Bjursta from IKEA we’d been eating on for years, layers of grime and sediment caking the leaf runners.

Of course, we didn’t want to rush it. We’d demolished our entire apartment to make room for a farm table, and we weren’t about to settle for any old thing. A diligent search began: a journey through Craigslist, Etsy, eBay. Sitting at our Bjursta, we perused Pinterest boards, scoured the websites of young designers, dug up Reddit tips about humble Amish woodsmiths.

We learned a few things. Such as: that no two farm tables are alike. That pine is favored because it allows for “charming dings and nicks.” That “circle-sawn” wood—or better yet, “mill-sawn”—has a richer texture than the soulless mass-produced band-saw stuff you find at the big-box retailers. We delved into the history of longleaf pine in the U.S., how King George II tried to steal it all for his palaces, and how most of the good stuff was clear-cut decades ago. We were told that wood grain is a kind of historical record, and that imperfections are therefore a good thing, to be cherished.

We also learned that homespun values come at a pretty steep price. Some pieces (because "pieces" is what you call them when you’re dropping this kind of money) were going for more than $5,000, charming imperfections and all.

One Etsy seller promised to provide a detailed provenance for each table, “where it came from, that property's history, owners, et cetera. As much info as we can gather, to help make your new addition a part of your family’s ongoing history.” Which raised an interesting question: What history would we bring to the table? "This appealing indentation is where Aaron slammed down his iBook that time the Wi-Fi kept going out. . . . This circular stain is where Amy put a tumbler full of grape juice. . . . This slight depression is where Aaron’s keys got wedged underneath him that one time when Aaron and Amy were making out on the table after a few glasses of Nebbiolo. . . ."

“Life will happen around this table,” the listing proclaimed meaningfully.

Gross.

I didn’t check the price on that one. Instead, reading those words, I immediately lost interest in the whole project. To be honest, it had been fading for weeks, a casualty of the dawning realization that no matter how many beguiling imperfections it had, no matter how distinctively mottled its surface or how rich its history, the perfect farm table is less an expression of individuality than of conformity. It was less a link to a bucolic past than a symptom of modern first-world malaise. It was, I realized, my 96-by-44-inch cry for help.

Eventually we took a time-out from surfing the furniture sites. I scraped the grime off the Bjursta’s gliders and tightened up the legs. Amy covered it with a nice spillproof shower curtain, which she hemmed to the perfect dimensions.

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